Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday February 05, 2013 @09:27PM
from the just-until-zefram-cochrane dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In decades and centuries past, scientific genius was easy to quantify. Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected. But as humanity, as a species, has gotten better at science, and the basics of most fields have been refined over and over, it's become much harder for any one scientist to make a mark on the field. There's still plenty we don't know, but so much of it is highly specialized that many breakthroughs are understood by only a handful. Even now, the latest generation is more likely to be familiar with the great popularizers of science, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan, than of the researchers at the forefront of any particular field. "...most scientific fields aren't in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn's classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways." Will we ever again see a scientist get recognition like Einstein did?"

Indeed -- if you invent stepping discs, or the transfer booth, or even an economical and practical flying car, you *will* get recognition.

You'll get recognition all right, ask Stanley Meyer how that worked out for him.It's not about inventing something new, it's about bringing it to fruition. Expect delays, expect opposition, expect heartbreak.

Indeed -- if you invent stepping discs, or the transfer booth, or even an economical and practical flying car, you *will* get recognition.

Yes, you'll be sued into poverty and then watch as some rich bastard takes your beautiful invention and ruins it. Nobody I know who has a creative / inventive nature is doing anything in this country because they know the only recognition they'll get will be from the large companies that own this country and control its laws. They will take everything and leave you with nothing.

Anyone with a good idea is well advised to flee to somewhere the United States' and its notions about intellectual property aren't going to interfere. China is right now (literally) knocking down mountains and building cities at a breakneck pace. Their economy is driven because they copy, then improve, in an iterative process without regard for intellectual property considerations. As a result, many of the world's goods and services now flow out of China. Yes, we may have invented those things, but they took them and made them better. Why can't we do the same? Oh right... Corporations.

There's plenty of talent right here to make that next big thing. And it's gone to ground because of the flying hunter-killers with lawyer bombs on patrol, looking for them. Legal theft. Small wonder innovation's ground to a halt in this country...

I've been living in China teaching English for two years now, and I can tell you that the locals themselves are quite wary of bad copies coming out of their own factories. The Chinese are indeed good at copying things, but not all of the copies necessarily work so well, and the few that do are still far behind most of the originals in one area or another.

Now, if you want to talk about the Japanese or the Germans for taking our original inventions and making them better, then I'm with you all the way. The Chinese? They still have a while to go before overcoming their issues, especially when the cheapskate culture is so widespread around here.

China, interestingly, doesn't really have brands. There are really few local brands that have any significant recognition (and virtually none with any recognition outside of China). This makes the products fully interchangeable: brands add value. You pay more for a Porsche because it's built by the Porsche factory. You wouldn't pay the same amount for a no-name brand sports car even if it looks and behaves just like a Porsche.

So what's left for the factories to compete on, is price. Consumers can not distin

Anyone with a good idea is well advised to flee to somewhere the United States' and its notions about intellectual property aren't going to interfere. China is right now (literally) knocking down mountains and building cities at a breakneck pace. Their economy is driven because they copy, then improve, in an iterative process without regard for intellectual property considerations. As a result, many of the world's goods and services now flow out of China. Yes, we may have invented those things, but they took them and made them better. Why can't we do the same? Oh right... Corporations.

Let me get this right. Someone is going to "flee" the US which at least has significant protection for inventions and go to China which institutionalizes the theft of IP.

The flying car should not be a problem. The only reason why we do not have it yet is not because of technical difficulties. We can hardly manage driving a car in two dimensions. Try to add an extra dimension for the movement of your flying car and see what happens. Think about the traffic control systems. Think what we have to have instead of traffic lights (That some people still do not pay any attention to). When you have worked out that, then come up with a flying car

So it should not be a problem, but then you promptly list a small handful of reasons why it is a problem.

Everything you've mentioned applies to the people driving it. I agree, the human element is the central weakness, and relying on humans to follow the rules is pointless, we can't even get you to turn on your spell checker.

But Google can make a driver-less car that works in two dimensions on a surface street bristling with moving targets and zero inter-target communication, and lots of stationary objects to hit. Such computer control would be actually easier in the air, where everything would be computer controlled, no stationary barriers, and everything would communicate with everything else.

So lets hand-waive away the control and navigation problems that are mostly human induced, and hand them off to the computer.

That STILL leaves a huge mountain to climb with regard to equipment durability, and failure proofing. Cars today are amazingly durable and reliable.Still, would you want to be flying in one of them? Or have them flying over your house? If only one in 10,000 or 100,000 flights ended in the enginestopping the results would be disastrous. What does fly gets rigorous maintenance and inspections by highly trained people. Not shade tree mechanicsand burger flippers apprenticing as mechanics.

I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision. While we are always inventing new ways to use physical laws, the laws themselves haven't changed substantially since quantum mechanics became well understood (proposed nearly 100 years ago).

Once upon a time, people didn't understand how many physical systems worked; the motion of galaxies and the intricacies of light interferometry were classic examples - a single scientist could make a new discovery, Now, we have good reliable models for their behaviour. The sorts of physics experiments that discover novel phenomena about how the mechanisms of the universe functions require teams and teams of physicists.

There are relatively few outright mysteries that remain - the Higgs Boson and the effects shaping the inflation of the universe (eg. dark mater) are classic examples of our time. I suspect that eventually, we will have a coherent explanation for all observable physical phenomena - it's not over yet by a long shot, but one day we'll figure it out.

I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision.

Agreed, the is what he is talking about, but was it not always thus?

When Mendel was laying the foundations of Genetics, the idea of DNA was unknown.He was working at the edge of knowledge, with no possible way forward.He described WHAT happened but could not even approach the HOW.

Now, DNA pretty much defines Genetics as a science. We understand the HOW somewhat better.At least we know where to look.

There must be more questions that we aren't even beginning to answer. WHY, for one (Why dna, Why here)WHERE for another. Did DNA originate here? If we find life on mars, will it have DNA?Or will it be totally different [gizmodo.com]?

"To the best of our knowledge, the original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times."

It always amuses me that Mendel's pea plant experiments would not get past peer review these days.

Scientists' methods evolve with the peer review process.
If it wouldn't get past peer review back then, he would likely have done something differently, so that it would meet the peer review standards of his day... assuming he intended to be published:)

we will have a coherent explanation for all observable physical phenomena

Contrary to popular belief we have no explaination for gravity, spacetime, or the other fundamental forces (eg: try and define "time" without the definition becoming circular). What we have are models that predict how these "miracles" behave and interact in most situations.

Sorry, I assumed people would insert those caveats themselves, I was thinking about scientific explanations not the type of explanation that is extracted from the arse of a preacher. This is because I don't see religion as an explanation of anything, I see it as speculation about everything. There's nothing wrong with speculation, it's only becomes a problem when it's mistaken for truth.

Er, you can scratch one of those things off the list. Matter being ingested into a black hole is known to be reversible. Stephen Hawking worked out the math to describe it, and it was so unexpected, it got named after him. Black holes can emit Hawking Radiation.

Entropy, on the other hand, is a prime example of one of the areas where groundbreaking science is still possible. Nobody knows what entropy is. There is no model of entropy itself. It's a term in an equation, the value for which is looked up i

I see your Brian Cox and raise you a Richard Feynman [youtube.com]. Key quote "I can't explain magnetism,..[snip]...that's just one of the things that you have to take as an element of the world, the existence of magnetic repulsion".

Now an explanation for magnetism may be discovered one day, but that will just push the problem down to another more fundamental property of the universe that "just is" (in Feynman's words finding an explanation for magnetism will just "peel another layer off the onion"). I agree science models reality better than any other method yet devised and gives us a deep understanding of the universe, but it cannot (currently) explain where the fundamental forces and spacetime come from, it just takes it as a given that they exist and can be observed.

There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision. While we are always inventing new ways to use physical laws, the laws themselves haven't changed substantially since quantum mechanics became well understood (proposed nearly 100 years ago).

Up until the 30s we didn't know about the neutron, which makes up about half of everything around you, including you. Until the mid to late 60s we didn't know about quarks or gluons, which actually make up almost all of everything around you. Even then we hadn't the faintest idea that we'd only discovered a third of the matter particles (well, a third of the ones we know about now. We're pretty sure there are more we haven't discovered yet).

Physics right up until the present day has been a non-stop factory of fundamental discoveries compared to other eras in history. The period between Newton and Einstein wasn't exactly devoid of progress, but it was also three hundred years.

I guess you're right though, the laws of physics haven't changed much since quantum mechanics became well understood, proposed nearly 100 years ago and last modified... well, we're still arguing about how exactly to modify them, but one of the last big revolutions requiring modification was the confirmation of neutrino mass, in 1998.

Of course, we know it's still wrong. Dark matter (probably), dark energy and the incompatibility between the standard model and general relativity means we still don't know what's going on.

The original poster's thesis is something silly that people, particularly non-scientists, have been saying for a long time, quite often right before some revolution shakes everything up. The particular example you chose to support his point is one a lot of people, including me, would choose to use to demolish it.

Why, just the other day I had ten guys with shovels on one group, and ten guys without shovels in another for a control group, and I ran an experiment on groundbreaking. Amazingly, the guys with shovels consistently did better. I expect to publish in Nature shortly, as soon as they it through peer review. I controlled for sleep, nutrition, and recent sexual activity. Because it is, after all, dirty work.

Which is stupid, and is just a blatant illustration of the author's lack of vision and understanding of the world and of history.

Actually I would say it is pretty much to be expected. We don't really know what the major, ground breaking discoveries are today which will have a major impact on peoples lives 50 years from now. So I think it would be quite normal for a non-scientist to look around and not understand or see how todays discoveries might affect them in several decades time. In fact I don't even think us scientists can do that either - at least with any degree of accuracy.

The result is that when you look back with hindsight you see the "big breakthroughs" for what they really are but this is only possible with hind sight. Who knew that the transistor would revolutionize almost every aspect of day to day life when it was invented?

The people you are thinking of are Lord Kelvin and Michelson. Michelson quoted lord Kelvin as saying all future science is in the 5th decimal place. But, as Michelson went on to explain, he didn't mean everthing left was about dotting i's and crossing t's. He meant it was unlikely that classica physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there. It just had to be lurking in the shadows-- out in the 5th decimal place. And sure enough it was. ANd still is. Just the other day someone measured the radius of a proton using muons instead of the usual electrons and it was wrong by 4%. That's absurdly huge. COuld be some new physcis is about to move into the light.

He meant it was unlikely that classical physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there.

"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Asimov, The relativity of wrong [tufts.edu].

In the late 1990's someone proclaimed that there was nothing more to invent, and he was proven to be very very wrong...

In the late 1890's people were proclaiming that there was hardly any more physics left to study, and universities were starting to actively discourage students from studying physics, as almost everything was solved.

Then Einstein came along with relativity, and quantum physics happened, and physicists are still trying to figure out the impact of all of that.

But one point TFA makes about "it's become much harder for any one scientist to make a mark on the field" is interesting. When you look at papers pub

Since nobody else here is going to do it (/., you disappoint me again), the quote you are looking for is:

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

This appears to be an urban legend. The quote is often misattributed to Charles Holland Duell [wikipedia.org] who in 1902 said:

In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold.

Or perhaps Patent Officer Henry Ellsworth [wikipedia.org] who in his 1843 report to Congress said:

The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

That latter quote being twisted and misattributed to Duell after the fact also.

"p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge."
I don't understand why more people don't accept this. Why is thinking that their is a fundamental difference between the sexes and that they are better suited for different hobbies/challenges/activities so wrong? Why do we push for equality for equality's sake? You are seeing this with video games recently and the complaints that the video game industry is sexist, there aren't enough women in

The problem with this is that it is completely wrong.
It's solely determined by culture which roles are considered suitable for men and women. I could watch the effect in real life, when former Eastern Europe went from communism to capitalism. The comp science at my local university was quite equally distributed male and female until 1990. And then came the end of the soviet dominated block, and inscriptions of female students plummeted. There were the same females than before, they even went through the same schools than before, just the last few years, when the career gets determined, were different. Suddenly business schools had a majority of female students, and comp science went to a 50:1 ratio of males and females.
If all it takes to change the ratio of males and females interested in a subject is a change of the environment, then it's completely unacceptable to describe differences in the preferences without referring to the environment which determines the differences.

While I don't agree with the article (or at least the summary) I don't think the Higgs Boson was the ground breaking science they're talking about. Finding it didn't change our view or model of how things worked. It reinforced it. Now the idea that time moves at different rates related to mass and acceleration. That's groundbreaking. Of course even that was dependent on numerous other little advances in observation. Until you can measure the speed of light accurately you're never going to wonder why i

Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.

Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.

Sorry to self reply, but another thought: the only reason people ask this stupid question or make the implied statement is that there's just do damn much groundbreaking science done today. Yes, it's harder to stand out than it was a couple hundred years ago. No, it's not because progress is slower - it's just ubiquitous. Science is more amazing than ever and in a hundred years it will be more amazing yet.

Shit, I think I'm arguing for the existence of something analogous to Kurzweil's moronic singularity.

Ask people who are famous scientists, and you'll get Einstein, Newton, and maybe a few modern ones like Watson and Crick, or Stephen Hawking (who incidentally probably IS more famous than any of those listed in the summary, and also has been at the forefront of his field).

So you have two big ones separated by a few centuries, then a scattering of scientists who are in the modern era. Going by that timeframe, we're highly likely to see groundbreaking research by a new famous scientist in the next 300 years.

There IS ground breaking science. Dark matter, dark energy, experimental measurements of cosmological inflation: our picture of the large scale structure of the universe has changed dramatically. Higgs bosons, neutrino mass: our picture of the microscopic structure of the universe has changed. We've found hundreds of extra-solar planets. We've built giant particle accelerators and telescopes, huge computers and data networks, peta-watt and X-ray lasers. We've sequenced the DNA of many creatures, including some that are extinct - and which we may bring back.We have pictures from the surface of a moon of Saturn, and an car driving around Mars.

I literally stayed home all last year (maybe a month outside tops) after leaving full time work, decided to dedicate the year to myself and leisure (damn first world problems! I'm only 29) and ended up spending over 12 hours every day online trying to keep up to date on the new breakthroughs and studies in most fields. The speed we're progressing at is so insane that perhaps this is why such articles are around, it's that there's so much ground breaking science happening our brains do w

While it may take more scientists, and more and grander hardware (like the LHC) there's still plenty of cool shit left to be discovered. Also some of it will likely have some amazing practical applications.

For example: Some day we may truly decode DNA. I don't mean just sequence it, I mean understand how it works, what it says, completely. Be able to read, and perhaps write, the code of life in a complete and precise fashion. Well that has a hell of a lot of implications as to what one could do with it, it

What the heck. It wasn't like one guy built a particle accelerator in his basement and discovered the Higgs boson. It took a large team of scientists and a large research infrastructure, which is what the article is about.

who 'discovered' the Higgs Boson? It was thousands of people all over the world, wasn't it?

Correct. All of the projects mentioned by the GP are similar in this respect, in that they required large investments of capital and manpower, and were the collective contribution of many very smart people. There is certainly plenty of groundbreaking science left to be done, but the idea of a lone patent clerk coming up with a huge breakthrough seems laughable now. Perhaps some genius will manage to invent cold fus

Einstein was famous because his discovered relativity. If he didn't discover it, someone else would have, and they would have been approximately as famous as Einstein.

There are lots of really famous scientists like bohr, heisenberg, feynman, etc. They did amazing groundbreaking work. And that wasn't even too long ago. Some science involves spending billions of dollars on particle accelerators to verify existing hypotheses, but it still takes visionaries (like Peter Higgs) to come up with the ideas worth building an LHC to verify.

To say that no one will ever be as famous as einstein, is to say that there isn't anything else out there that we could learn that would be as mind blowing as relativity. Maybe that's true, but I don't see any reason to believe it is true.

After Newton came up with his laws, I'm sure the scientists of the time felt they'd pretty much figured it out. Sure there was some details that needed filling in, but Newton had hit the nail on the head and it was just a matter of time before everything else fell into place with this new knowledge. Why would anything contradict these laws? They are so perfect!

Well it turns out they weren't so perfect afterall, and observations did contradict Newtons laws that they had to be wrong in some fundamental way. Nothing but a revolutionary theory was going to make sense of it.

We are already in a time when stuff doesn't make sense. Phase 1 complete. All we need is for someone to complete phase 2 and come up with a clean equation (or a crazy dirty one) that explains it all, and phase 3 build a really fucking expensive death ray type device to open a portal into another dimension to verify that it's right. What an exciting time we live in.

When you read about scientific history, it seems like discoveries come so fast because we get to skip all the boring parts. In the present it seems to go so slow because we can't fast forward. But in reality things are going so much faster now. Maybe the next great scientists will be an artificial intelligence that we create.

500 years ago: scientific research is done by aristocrats as a self-funded hobby, or sometimes by priests [wikipedia.org] after the Catholic Church got over it's butthurt on heliocentrism. Printing is exorbitantly expensive and education for the general population. There might have been hundreds of Issac Newtons born in a generation, but they ended up working on farms or in the military, not going to an academy.

Now: research is directly sponsored by governments. You don't have to be in the priesthood or be the child of rich parents to go to secondary school anymore - though the latter certainly helps with admissions and student loans. The Mars Rovers were huge government funded, collaborative projects, not a hobby by Bill Gates. And of course the Internet allows sharing of data at a speed and volume that Newton never could have imagined.

You would hope the "anonymous reader" would have thought about this after a couple seconds, and is just posing the question for conversational purposes....

" Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected."... many years later. Their contemporaries often criticized and ridiculed them, even threatening excommunication if they didn't recant.

Sure, Einstein was ground breaking, but apart from E=mc^2, how many people know what he did (or even what it means)? How many know of the photoelectric effect? Relativity and quantum mechanics gets thrown around a lot as buzzwords, but most people have no idea what they mean.

So you might consider that Einstein has become a great popularizers of science - unintentionally, but most people know that he was in a physicist, and don't really have a clue what he did.

You seem to want groundbreaking to mean both Famous and Important Contributions. But I'm not sure how long it took for Einstein to become a household name. And you also want it to be One man/woman. That might not be as realistic anymore. Because research in most areas requires lots of equipments and teams (except in a few areas - theoretical mathematics and physics come to mind). But just because it is a team, doesn't make it any less valuable.

In fact, I prefer teams and organizations get recognition. Students and the younger crowd have something concrete to work towards. Not "I want to be the next XYZ", but instead "I want to work at XYZ". They might have a hero-worship of the organization, but will still work hard towards something measurable.

Many seem to be declaring that a new breakthrough is right around the corner. But I suspect they don't realize how successful our current theories already are. In fundamental physics, we simply can't find anything that deviates from our current theories at scales smaller than a galaxy and at energies small enough to be relevant to anything except the big bang and future particle colliders. What would a breakthrough in fundamental physics look like? Maybe someone finds a supersymmetric particle that guid

Uh huh. Got an apple? Drop it. We still don't really know how that works. We've got a theory that describes what happens pretty well, the only problem is that it's incompatible with pretty much everything else we think we know. Don't think resolving that would have some practical implications? See Star Trek to get an idea of some of the things we could do if we could manipulate gravity the way we do electromagnetism.

Okay, how about something a little closer to home. If you live in New York it's quite

1. What is a magnetic field?2. What is a electric field?3. What is gravity?4. Do tachyons exist?5. Does the Higgs Boson exist?6. Does matter decay?7. Is a magnetic field really a field or is it just another property of space-time?8. In how any dimensions does the Universe or multiverse exist? (The basic question of string theory)9. Can magnetic and electric fields be quantized or are they continuous?10. Can time and space be quantized or is it continuous?11. Why can't we all just get along?12. Is the universe a giant predetermined simulation playing out or do we have free will.

We are a species that just recently wandered in off the Sahara. We know a lot about a little. Our knowledge is like Swiss cheese, full of holes, gaps, and inconsistencies. There are things we observe but can't explain and things we can explain but can't observe. Go watch this video from Fenyman...

Your list is a bit problematic. We have excellent theories of quantum electrodynamics that are compatible with special relativity and effectively answer 1,2 7 and 9. 3 is good: there would be a nobel prize for anyone who creates a successful theory of quantum gravity. 4 is like asking 'does bigfoot exist'. We have very good reasons to think the answer is no. 5 wouldn't get you a nobel prize becomes the first publication was last summer. 6 has a definite answer 'yes and no: top quarks decay, electron

We have made quite a few novel technologies from exploiting the electromagnetic fields, but gravity eludes us. Imagine if we could use our electromagnetic technologies to play with gravity fields. We could generate gravity and build amazing trash compactors and possibly even fusion generators, in addition to a whole new realm of practical jokes. Just imagine the practical jokes you could play with a gravity field generator, Additionally, we could possibl

Some things never change. Stupid gimboids complaining that everything has been invented and lamenting that all the groundbreaking science has been done is probably one of the few immutable things one can count on (like taxes).

Some fields where there is growth and potential for breakthrough will include the field of statistics proper and fields that rely heavily on it. The revolution in information technology has enabled growth in the field of statistics because it has allowed the investigation of theoretical questions that could not be tested before cheap and powerful computational facility came before. CART and Random Forest algorithms, for example, were made possible by the IT revolution. Fields like genetics (obviously) and

For example, some people say physicist Ed Witten is greater than Einstein or Newton. In any case, there are probably more super geniuses working on science than ever. Maybe there are fewer breakthroughs from genius, precisely because science has become professionalized and there are already many geniuses working on the big problems. In such an environment, the huge breakthroughs and paradigm shifts just aren't left waiting around to be found.

Groundbreaking science is not happening right now, but it is necessary for future expansions of science.

Right now, I feel like we're in the period between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Relativity. We're 99% sure of everything we know, but there's a last 1% that doesn't quite add up. Little oddities, like nobody having a good idea as to why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. And once some actual genius figures out the key, "breaks the ground" as it were, that 1% will bloom into entire new fields of science. To keep up the relativity metaphor, nobody in the 1890s had any concept of quantum physics, which is now a massive field with sub-branches that you can get a doctorate in.

Soon - probably within a few decades - someone will discover something groundbreaking, which in turn will trigger off more new discoveries. Science tends to work like that - once a critical mass of knowledge is reached in an area, it grows explosively until we near the limits of the field. Electricity is a great example. Dozens, even hundreds, of groundbreaking scientists and engineers, making their mark in electric science in a very short period of time. There were similar bursts for aeronautics, computer science, nearly any field.

As for what this groundbreaking new field of science will be? No idea. The sci-fi nerd in me would like it to be some sort of hyperspace, to let us explore the stars in reasonable timespans, but that's no likelier than any other thing.

What is the breakthrough we are twiddling our thumbs for will be something to do with energy, be it a way to do fission on the cheap, or even better, a way of doing fusion. Even cold fusion still hasn't been written off, although it has been moved into the "woo-woo" camp next to "free energy" and perpetual motion machines.

Lets say there is a breakthrough that allows a cold fusion reactor to be made, and scalable from something that could power a watch for 100 years to terawatt reactors.

Not only every breakthrough that could be made has already been made, it gets worse for the liberal arts. All the Great American Novels that could be written has already been written. Same with great poems, great opera, great screen plays and great musicals. Nothing more to invent. That is all folks. The last guy to leave please turn off the switch.

You realize that discoveries like his only come very rarely as he discussed new areas of science. How many other physicists out there were around Einstein's time?

I'll mention an invention that is "ground breaking" and done in my lifetime.

100Gb Ethernet.

Growing up, I had access to a 300baud modem. That's 300 tones per second. So if one "tone" equated to a bit, then this modem could send 300 bits per second.

100Gb is 107,374,182,400 bits.

or the equivalent of 357,913,942 300baud modems or more modems than the population of the United States (~313m).

Someone had to discover the technologies and methods required to be able to transmit multiple signals at 12.5Gb/sec, and how to transmit multiple wavelengths down the same copper cable or optical fibre without interference...

Hard drive technology? When I graduated from college, the disk arrays I worked on had 9, 18 and 36GB drives in them. So a TB was a lot of storage. Now with advances in hard drive technology like GMR [wikipedia.org] we have multi Terabyte hard drives in our laptops.

Go back and read the newspapers on microfiche of when Einstein made his discoveries. I doubt people were throwing parades in his honor.

Broaden your scope into what areas you're looking at for "discoveries".Other well known "inventors":

It bugs the crap outta me when people start equating flying cars to breaking science. Science is the fundamental stuff like the physics or biology. Engineering is the practical application of science and building things. 10-gig ethernet is the application of existing scientific principles. Now a flying car could be a scientific breakthrough if it involves a new anti-gravity module but not if it's just a small plane.

I forsee new breakthroughs in materials science as we are starting to understand material properties in new ways (the science) and learning how to manufacture new materials with unique properties (the engineering side of the equation).

At least Samuel Pierpoint Langley, Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom have managed to convince 63% [mnn.com] that global climate change is real and they've only been going since the 1890s.

Still, could be worse: Galileo was imprisoned for the remainder of his life and his writing banned in 1618. The establishment (Catholic Church) didn't lift that interdiction on heliocentrism until 1822. Darwin's got another half century before he reaches Galileo's 204 years.

You could have said the same in Einstein's day. You could have said there was no way to measure the speed of light. That we'll never know much about particles we can't see with our strongest optical microscopes. That the atmosphere places fundamental limitations on out ability to observe the stars, and that we'll never be able to detect exoplanets until we build a horking huge telescope that's physically impossible to construct.

Geniuses don't come along very often. It may just be that we haven't seen a true scientific genius in a few generations. Or that people who are capable of earth-shattering discoveries were lured away from science and into investment banking.

Two days ago the entry on a physicist, who I thought came accross something pretty profound, was deemed not noteworthy by Wikipedia. I was originally prompted to create a biographical stub on him because they have articles on two rugby players by the same name. But it seems Wikipedia has more in common with highschool than I realized: The jocks get more attention.

Anyhow, this dude from down under found a pretty astounding approach to the correspondence principle [wikipedia.org] (i.e. how QM gives rise) to classical mechanics in a mathematical framework originally developed by Steven Weinberg. Something the latter astoundingly overlooked. The talkback page on this math can be found here [wikipedia.org]. The article itself meanwhile has been deleted. Please note: Not because the math is wrong, but because the citation record has been deemed to be too low by the editors.

There's a blog post [wavewatching.net] with links to his recovered papers (most follow up papers on this were actually lost for a while a never published). So if you have a physics background you can form your own opinion.

To me this is a pretty good example of how really interesting findings can simply be washed away in the avalanche of mediocre papers that get produced every day.

It is hard to have your creativity crushed, correctly, for years and not let it stifle your drive to test the walls of the box. In today's world of mature sciences nobody could make a great leap without knowing a great deal that couldn't be leaped over and where their attempts to leap failed. The people who can do it will be rarer still than in the past and in a time and place to succeed in that leap even more rarely but it will still happen eventually.

I actually think that aside from the base knowledge needed complexity and everyone having thought of everything has nothing to do with it. Great leaps are always simple seeming after discovered and even simpler in the minds of the men who discover them.

Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.

Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.

Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.

Mark my worlds most of the things we think are impossible today will be possible later. FTL travel? It won't be found by someone trying to travel FTL but by someone who doesn't see the universe in terms of space and travel at all. Twenty or even a hundred years later people will be amazed at how advanced they are, making progressive discoveries that stem from that man's simple perspective. Almost none of them will intuitive see things in that simple way though. They will be smarter men capable of harassing and riding all the complexity of utilizing the model without that simple understanding. Fundamental advancements require thinking in a fundamental way.

How about Tesla? I dare say we have more data and analysis of electricity and magnetism than he did. Probably a much more detailed and complex understanding of even Tesla's own inventions. In fact we tend to think we know all about it. Yet, I have no doubt that were the man alive today he would be doing things that are fundamental progressions of his intuitive mental model on these topics but revealed fundamental and groundbreaking new ideas to everyone else. He could probably explain the entire topic fully in three sentences and nobody would get it. They would just think he was simplifying great complexity for minds simpler than his own.

I've often wondered similar things. While science is still being done and many people are arguing that, the level of accomplishments haven't yielded nearly the same results for the average individual compared to what happened in the last century or further. I blame this on society and mainly on capitalism, which only looks to fuel profitable endeavors and people are only looking for the cheapest means to stay alive, or how to make the most money in life.

Space, deep sea, nuclear... general exploration and development as a country has ground to a halt. Instead we're focusing on wars in countries we have no reason of fighting for and patents... then exploiting them. Our country may not be dying, but it's march forward has definitely slowed down. Everyone is out to make as much money as possible. Exploration and being adventurous is no longer part of American lifestyle. It's all about being safe and living as long as humanely possible.

No one takes big risks anymore, it's all about small calculated decisions (mainly decided by a machine), which we bet on which will show income. Even the space industry has somehow ended up in the hands of the private sector, which may seem great, but wont work in our favor down the line when everyone depends on them for their services and the government can't take over because that would be unAmerican.

Our country is totally mismanaged. Our society is bombarded constantly by capitalist propaganda (buy this and you'll be happy, take this and you'll be healthy) and shows designed to placate the mind. Our education system is starting to break down as the less intelligent take over and see fit to destroy something because it doesn't provide instant, easily quantifiable results.

Capitalism may have founded this country, but we've gotten to a point where we've outgrown it. Perhaps not completely... but we have to a point where it's started to hinder development outside of how to shake the most pennies out of the average citizen. This is a time when we actually need a leader to step up and push big businesses out of the picture and actually plot a direction for the country. Sadly, we haven't seen a president like that in many years... or a country that's willing to accept him.

No scientist knew if atoms were real or not, and they knew it, and they had no mechanistic explanation for the regularities in the recently understood periodic table, and they knew it. They had no mechanistic quantitative explanation for chemical reactions or reaction rates, and knew it.

Right now, physicists know that they have no good, experimentally confirmed, ideas for explaining

The book I'm reading at the moment, The God Problem, has a nice theory* replacing dark energy with gravity by proposing the shape of our universe as a 3D torus (or bagel as described in the book). I'm only about 10% of the way through, pretty big book, but finding it entertaining so far and if it continues to hold up in the face of verifiable data it would change our entire view of the universe. It's even calculated the potential end of the universe, when it annihilates with it's anti-matter cousin, as bein

Today they do have good knowledge about virtually all materials and energetic processes typically occurring and observable on Earth,That's a difference from the 19th century.

Derived consequence: progress will be slow until we'll see a jump at least one order of magnitude (if not more) in either:
1. energies available to use during an experiment; or 2. capacity to sense and sift the irrelevant from what the universe throws at us

Without the above to confirm/falsify the theories, everything is a matter of "scientific faith" (the "church of strings", the "congregation of super-string", the "church of the standard model")

No scientist knew if atoms were real or not, and they knew it, and they had no mechanistic explanation for the regularities in the recently understood periodic table, and they knew it. They had no mechanistic quantitative explanation for chemical reactions or reaction rates, and knew it.

Right now, physicists know that they have no good, experimentally confirmed, ideas for explaining

If time travel ever is discoverable, where are all the time travelers?

Perhaps they vanished in a parallel reality? If you travel to the past, you will change the future. Like a butterfly causing a storm, a single breath will change the future, and your future you will not be yourself anymore, which imply that you are not you anymore.

The importance of his work is still largely unrecognized, as suggested by the fact that he still hasn't received the Nobel prize (and I firmly believe he deserves it)

Deserves it for what? The metagenomics research was pretty cool (but not really revolutionary), and the synthetic biology work is also very neat, but it hasn't really changed the field. His contribution to genome sequencing was far less than many of his fans would like to think; the biggest impact was forcing the public project to reorganize